


The Serpent and the Barley

by AceQueenKing



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Gen, Sibling Bonding, Sibling Rivalry, The Titanomachy (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:15:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25611928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/pseuds/AceQueenKing
Summary: Demeter and Hades, through the war years.
Relationships: Demeter & Hades (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 50





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [frenchtoastandsourdough](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frenchtoastandsourdough/gifts).



> For frenchtoastandsourdough - a lovely friend, and a near-flawless human being. Thanks for putting up with me even when my ideas run away from me. <3 Happy birthday, friend!

It was Demeter who found him.

Hestia had been too busy keeping both herself and Hera provided for, roasting the little bits of food they got in their hellish entrapment with her powers. They had not yet grown to the all-consuming flame of adulthood — in those days, Hestia's flame sputtered, cut off from the aether she needed to light the bonfires she would one day become famous for. Hera, with her sharp eyes, was the one who looked for things that might be edible in their father's strange cave, taking over Demeter's duty in this as soon as she could walk. And so, it fell to middle-child Demeter to protect them both. Demeter, whose powers were useless in their entrapment. She could not feel the ground then, and knew nothing of her talents without it. It was Demeter who was forced to patrol the lands which only she and her sisters knew and to hunt in them for dangers: rising tides, open sores.

It was thus her who found the baby. At first, she could not see him. but heard him: a strange fussing noise. The noise stuck to her through the years; it was the sound that she would always think of when she thought of him. She did not know it was a child. She thought it a bit a food, or perhaps some strange new threat. She did not have words to call it anything more specific: not _bird_ nor _rabbit_ , nor _grass_ , nor _honey —_ in Cronus such things were unknown. There was only food or danger or, more commonly, the wide expanse of nothing.

What she found was a being both like her and not. She recognized him for what he was immediately, knew him from the godly ichor that beat in his heart and hers alike: the same blood, the same trauma. Even then, she noticed the differences: the strange genitals beyond what she had to that point known (she had thought him broken, herself not yet recognizing the difference between men and women), his skin pale where hers was dark. She picked him up from the soft blanket their unknown mother had wrapped him in, that her father had devoured him in. Hades sobbed with abandon, inconsolable, but his voice was weak and soft.

She named him, then. Not in the language of their parents, which none of them at that point knew, but in the language that was hers, that was Hera's, that was Hestia's; that would one day be Poseidon's and Zeus' and even all of mankind, when all mankind spoke but one tongue. It was her who named him, who called him _unseen,_ Hades. She did not know, yet, how accurate such was. She did not know, yet, how he would hide like a cuckoo in her nest, how he would snatch her most precious child from her when she least expected it. This was a great deal before. They did not know earth yet. They did not even know stone.

Hera stared at him curiously when she brought him back to the fire Hestia provided. Things burnt rarely and poorly (they were wet, always wet). "It's an ugly thing," Hera pronounced, her ruling as usual smart and accurate, but Demeter had thought it wrong, had thought it too sharp.

"No," she said, staring at him: they had the same eyes, her and her brother. She felt protectiveness well up in her chest, felt the bond of sibling-love settle into her. Hades, too young to know anything but this small kindness, settled into her shoulder. And remained there for the next several years: at first on her shoulder, then as her shadow, joining her on patrols, his breath always only a hair's breadth from her own. He trained with her in their meager ways of defending themselves against a threat they did not yet know but instinctually they knew it must have existed. (Deep within her bones, she always knew: the war was coming.) She did not know yet what hellish prison that they had been sent to, but she knew, even then, that this was an unusual and unkind, oppressive place. None of them knew where they were, but they knew it to be a crucible that would forge them all. One day they would find the keys to their wet, miserable prison. Until then, they could only take what they could get and make the most of it.

And so they grappled with children's games of war: wrestling, punching, and squalling. It was easy to overpower him at first, then became a tougher fight as Hades grew older. Hades himself grew stronger than her, though she did not understand why, not for many years. Still, for all his natural strength, he was a poorer strategist; her ability to see openings gave her the ability to get past his strength, to use her smaller size to her advantage. They were always together. Gradually, he learned to apply her own strategies against her, making the fights between them true competition and sport.

Hestia smiled, pleased as she was whenever her siblings were working together. Hera became jealous of the camaraderie between them. By the time Poseidon came around — this time, she knew the signs; this time, she told Hades to stop, to find their newest sibling, and Poseidon, much louder, was easier to find — it was Hera who tucked their newest brother under her arm, certain that she would have her own "little shadow" soon enough.

Hera dismissing Hades as such was cruel, but it would not be the last time someone called her brother such a name. It did not deter her nor him. They remained the best of friends, if never more than that; they were of the same mind. Always practical, Demeter and Hades. Always patrolling, training. His powers, like hers, had not yet come in; only Hestia, Hera, and, later, Poseidon, held any such powers in their horrible childhood home, and given such a climate, their other sibling's powers were fickle, barely able to be reached through the stranglehold their father placed upon them. But lacking even that, for Demeter and Hades, furious training and constant patrolling was the only method they could contribute to their home, and Hades, like herself, hated the thought he could offer nothing.

Demeter was still young enough then that she thought one day they would be freed of their prison, and that from that day forth, things would be equal between them all. She had thought they would find food together, share shelter together, as they always had — not just herself and Hades but Hera and her sharp tongue and Hestia and her gentle clucking and Poseidon and his already loud and indomitable voice, roaring as fantastically as the ocean. (She did not know oceans, yet; only the tides of her father's belly, but they were no less perilous.) Hades rarely voiced more than agreement with her. "We will fight a war," he echoed her, her little shadow. "We will make ourselves free."

But so rarely did her brother say more than that. At the time, she had brushed off such; she had thought it was simply his fear of promising so much, of fantasizing a future that she knew may damn well not come to pass.

Later, of course, she thought differently.

When they were freed, it came without war nor warning. The tides of their dangerous childhood home shifted; for all that they had lived and patrolled and planned, this manner of egress took them entirely by surprise. Hades reached for her; Hera held Poseidon, and Hestia clung to herself and no other, as they climbed higher and higher, attempting to outrun the dangerous acid that licked at their heels. Eventually, they failed, and the bile took them the rest of the journey, spitting them out in a disgusting mass of acidic flesh.

They untangled themselves. There were voices of surprise and alarm —the first voice she heard, upon this earth was her father's voice, loud and scowling, outraged by the thought of their existence. His voice was as deep as Hades, and though the conclusion was, inevitably, that Hades took after their father, she could not help but think their father's voice took after Hades own.

She could not understand his words; this language, the old language, was not one she had heard as anything but distant, muffled murmurs. They did not need such language, they had made their own. This was perhaps mercy, for she was blissfully ignorant of what her father was screaming, though she recognized from his face that what it was must have been a terrible fury indeed. There were others there: servants or slaves, she did not at this point know which (and in future will never quite be certain of the difference between the two in her father's court, but by then it is long-old history). They stare in horror. There is a woman in the background in great finery; she did not recognize her yet, but the woman was her mother.

Frightened of the madman and his court, she turned her attention back to safer ground, to the siblings who had formed her entire world until this one moment. The division between them was clear. Hera, Poseidon, and Hestia: they were looking to the sky for the first time, blinking with wonder as they beheld their celestial grandfather, far away. For them, this high post held the strongest allure. Their powers were drawn from higher elements: air, water, fire. A bit of star-stuff in all of them.

She noticed none of it. Neither did Hades. Hades, like herself, looked at her, then down at the world below. Their powers had always come from their grandmother's line; the sudden realization of it, jolting through their flesh, was electric, overwhelming. Hades reached for her hand and she grasped his. The ground, to this point so far as she knew a rocky morass, blossomed suddenly in a fury of green. Later, she would learn it was her own powers that caused this.

Everyone stopped and everyone saw. Her father stopped his screaming. Hades stared, disbelieving, and their other siblings looked down with them, not knowing what the strange green thing beneath their feet was. In her father's court, food was a rare thing, prized. This sudden burst of life was a bevy of food the likes of which none had ever seen. Each generation of the earth goddesses, Demeter would learn, had placed their claim upon the world: Gaia the hot rock that formed the core of all things, and Rhea who had cooled Gaia's heat into the crusted mantle that rendered it possible for the world to grow. Her own mother made a few plants too, hardy things that could survive any climate: roots and thorns. Demeter brought the plants of sustenance, the perennials, the evergreens; Persephone, in her time, would bring with her the more fickle plants: the flowers, the vines, the annuals.

(But Persephone did not exist yet, and neither did this knowledge.)

What did exist at that moment was stunned silence.

In seconds it would devolve into a rush of action, but not yet.

First: Her and Hades squeezed hands. This was the moment she would always remember, first with joy, then with pain: Hades hand in her own, still young, not yet callused with time and experience. They had always been together. Their first and most important hand to hold was one another. It was not a romance, even then; but it was trust, and it was friendship, of a sort.

Neither of them said a word, for neither of them was wordy; it was their siblings who filled silences. She doubted anyone else noticed their fumbling as they both pressed their feet deep into the earth, itself newly loamy, itself simultaneously ancient and new. In future, there would be the war: in minutes, seconds even. But for one magic moment, this new world was theirs.

"Earth," she mumbled, naming it with her tongue. Her first word out into the world.

"Earth," he agreed, and it was so. _Gaia_ , in the mother tongue, named after their unknown grandmother, but they did not speak such, yet; among other things, their father stole their ability to speak in the titan-tongue. "Earth," he said again. Outside of their constraints, she noticed for the first time how her brother's voice lacked an echo here, in a world where the sky was so high she could not stretch her fingers and reach it.

And that was all she had time to notice before chaos came. Their father set his servants upon them, and even without knowing his words, Demeter knew his intent was to kill them, could tell by the hot burn of his voice, the pleading of the woman who would one day be known as their mother. He tossed their mother aside, and their servants—an early form of humanity, not quite the same as those creatures now, but similar—circled.

Zeus, the newest of her brothers (though their relationship was yet unknown), said something in his father's tongue. The finer detail was los, because that was a language that they did not speak. She did not understand his words yet, however, some things were universal, and she understood the intent: to egress, to leave, to flee. Zeus turned and grabbed a hand —Hera's —and tugged her down the only path left for them to escape. Hera grabbed Poseidon, who grabbed Hestia. No one grabbed Demeter's hand, but she was already holding Hades hand, and such made her bolder. She tugged at him, but he did not move.

Hades did not run. He stared now at his father, and she wondered if he perhaps was frozen by the similarities between them. She turned to yell at him, her own command high in her mouth to _run_ , to _go_ , but it mattered little, even in a language he knew more intimately than any other. They were not used to running, the five of them; their legs were unsure, not used to ground that did not slip and wobble upon every purchase.

The people surrounded them. The mortals who served her father were not like those who would come to serve them: they were desperate things: filthy, hungry. They surrounded them with simple weapons: bone, clubs, and the like. But they were plenty frightening for people who had never seen weapons, never seen anything but one another. Zeus raised his own weapon, a simple dirk — so obvious to see, even to them, that such was not enough.

"We're finished," Hera said, her voice a soft wail of fragility. As usual, Hera's words were pithy, smart, and a sharp and stunning indictment of their situation. Zeus turned toward her, an eyebrow raised, surely not understanding their language but understanding the cry enough. He said something in return — she could not know it then, and did not remember it enough later, when she is as fluent in titan-tongue as their own, to understand what it was, but she suspected from the sounds of it that it was meant to be comforting.

Hades held out his free hand. There was a look on his face that Demeter would never forget: calm but sharp concentration. "What are you doing?" Hera hissed; Demeter held onto his other hand all the more. Hades did not speak, but she felt the power that welled up within him, a hot shot of some obscene metal screaming through his veins and flooding the area with a smell she'd later recognize as _lead_. 

The humans — or whatever they were, mortals of some kind — fell. It was as if they were marionettes, each with their strings cut. Demeter did not recognize death, and neither did the rest of her then-known siblings. It was that which kept the five of them calm, which led Hera to gruffly say, "We need to go!" They did not realize, then, the destructive gift their brother held.

Zeus did. He stared at Hades in a new-found stun, respect or fear or something in-between glittering between his eyes. He ran, and the rest of his new-found siblings ran with him, despite the fact that none of them could speak his language. That he had somehow helped them — that was enough for the five to agree to the alliance. They had no friends in this world, and many enemies. They could not afford to be choosey.

Zeus ran them hard, ran them down one mountain with their father and other, older, ancient gods, all screaming for their heads as they thundered after the future Olympians’ feet. There were over 715,674 _pous_ in-between the two mountains of Orthys and Olympus (though she did not know this, not yet; later, during her time of great suffering, she will walk each and every one of them, feel the earth crack and tremble under her feet, and count each painful memory as she passes). Then, she felt every single pebble of the distance as they ran. She did not know when they would stop running, or, more accurately, stumbling, as fast as they could, but Zeus seemed to know a way and so they all leapt after him as he ran towards some unknown goal. What choice did they have? Of all her siblings, it was Hades who ran fastest, perhaps trying to outrun what he had done; she took the rear. She could go faster, but such would leave Hera or Hestia more vulnerable, and so she covered their retreat with her own. She did not dare to turn back, but she could hear the thunder of her forefathers' monstrous feet behind her.

Finally, they broke from the plains before the titans could quite catch them; Zeus guided them into a cave, and they followed. Hades, fast at Zeus' heels, arrived first, but Zeus, quick as a knife, shoved him back.

"Not you," he said, though none of them understood the words. Still, the gesticulation made it clear. "Only the others." He held up four fingers, shook his head, and pushed Hades again. Hades made a noise in the back of his throat, a wordless exclamation of distress. It reminded her of finding him, all those years ago. He did not otherwise complain. He started to turn away, to a death Demeter, even in this moment, recognized as certain.

It was Demeter who grabbed his hand, stopped him from leaving them all. "Five or none," she said, in her own language.

"Five or none," Poseidon echoed; Hera followed, and Hestia too. Zeus looked at them all, raised an eyebrow, and stepped aside. They advanced into the cave, collapsing as soon as they awerere far enough inside that the titans could not hear their breath.

They were all quiet for a long time. The cave was comforting, closer to their homeland. The sky was once more within her grasp, limestone she could reach up and caress like the walls of their childhood prison. They folded into one another, five on one side, Zeus on the other. For a long time, none of them could talk. It felt too sacred a moment to say a word, the freedom they suddenly held overwhelming. No one asked why Zeus attempted to shut Hades out, for what point was there? Zeus could not reply in a language they did not know. They did not have the words in his language to even ask.

Finally, it was Hestia, of course, who broke the spell. "Hestia," she said, tapping her chest. She held out a hand with just one finger raised; she tapped Demeter's shoulder and it was clear what she wanted her to do.

"Demeter," she said, and raised two fingers; she tapped Hera's shoulder, and Hera introduced herself the same, and then, Hades and, finally, Poseidon.

"Zeus," he said, smoothly. He held out six fingers. "Brother," he said; it is not a word she knew, but she repeated it in her mouth after him, mulled the strange syllables.

"Brother," she said. And it was not a great deal of conversation, but things happen in private spaces, and in this one, they became allies.

For a time, anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

In the first moments after their freedom, it was Hades who came up with their first means of protection. She found him the next morning. Serious, studious Hades, up, as usual, before the rest of them. This was not a surprise: generally, it had been Hades or herself who was first up, patrolling the strange, slippery grounds of their homeland for potential enemies, blockages; what had shifted during their slumber.

Surprisingly, he did not look at what quickly took Demeter’s attention: the strange look of the sun in the sky, burning brightly. It made her eyes water, and she couldn’t stop staring at it. The sky seemed dizzyingly far, and she winced with vertigo at the thought of it, so impossibly far away. She risked putting a hand out into the sky, trying to touch the top of it – only to have her little brother slap it away.

“Don’t,” he muttered. “We don’t know if any of _them_ are out there...”

  
“Yes,” she said. She wondered, then, if he had been captured by the same instinct, if he had also tried to reach for such a strange, bright ceiling and found nothing but air touching his hands. How odd, to feel the air, the world: to reach up and touch anything more than her father’s scalding body. How odd, to feel _nothing_.

“Here,” her brother said, even more brusque than usual. He led her away from their siblings, keeping his eyes upon the door. She felt a brief flash of guilt: she had trained him for that, hadn’t she? _Keep an eye on your surroundings_. And now her younger brother was rescuing her. He crouched down once they were sufficiently hidden. She sat beside him.

“Do you feel it?” He muttered, looking around her. “The ground?”

She reached her hand out, scratched at the strange surface. Unlike Cronus, always soft and slick, the stone was rough and unyielding. It was different, and she enjoyed the difference. It did not sing to her as the soil did, but she understood, then, how desperate Hades may have been for something new.

“It is good, this ground,” she said, leaning down, trying to relax. She was sure that Zeus would lead them onward when the others stirred, and if Poseidon continued to snore as loud as he currently was, then it would surely not be very long before everyone was up. “Different, but good.”

“No,” he said. She looked at him, confused. “Do you not _feel_ it? It calls…” He did not have the words to suggest their powers, she thought.

“I felt that with the...” She did not yet have a word for _dirt_. She attempted to describe it; she was not sure if she had done so well enough he knew what she was talking about. She could not even remember, quite, what she had said, moments after she had said it – for he swirled his finger and what it produced made her nearly speechless.

Gold—she did not have the word yet, but knew already it was something both useful and precious, something she had only seen on her finely dressed mother, on her father’s breast – swirled from Hades’ hands.

“It talks to me,” he said, softly, and she raised her eyebrows. Hades had found two talents after being released from their prison; she had found one, and held no control over it. He, on the other hand, seemed to have near-total control. She thought, once more, of Zeus, how he had shoved Hades aside. And she knew at that moment that the reason was _fear_ : fear of what his brother could be. She did not yet know that Zeus had been told he would one day hold a king’s crown. She did not yet know that the division between her bothers would one day cleave them all in twain.

"Demeter," he said; outside the cavern of their father, his voice still sounded strange. She missed the low echo of it. He pressed a bit of the golden filament into her hand, and she frowned. “Can you…?”

“No,” she said, though in truth she did not know. Nothing about this world felt quite knowable. She reached out her hand and tried to imitate her brother. She felt nothing. The only thing she could feel any sort of commune with was dirt. The stone was still and silent and she could not help but slightly resent it.

"If I think about it, I can..." He closed his eyes, waved his hands over his chest; a breastplate appeared, bright and gleaming bronze, perfectly fitted. “Like his.” It was a perfect copy of Zeus’ own breastplate; she wondered if Hades had studied it, his sharp eyes glaring upon it in the dark, studying the man who would have let him die. "Perhaps he will resent this."

There was a flash of something in those eyes: pain, she thought. Pain that burned brightly. He had not, to that point, been used to rejection. That would change, but neither of them knew that, not quite yet.

“I think he will be glad,” she said. “You have a gift, brother.” The word felt odd in her tongue, but she knew it was the language they would need to adapt to – though this knowledge, too, was wrong. “He will see it as your gift, your need to protect us.”

"Protection," he said. He mulled the word; he sounded surprised at the thought. “Yes. It is my duty,” he said. “And yours.”

“Yes.” It had always been their duty, and they took to it well.

He placed one big hand on her shoulder: one of the last times he would touch her like this, like it was nothing to do so. Soon enough, Zeus would no longer approve of her holding Hades' hand. Years down the line, she would not wish to touch him; would shiver if given the option. But such was far in future, then.

"Hold still," he said, as he pulled gold metal through his fingers from nothing, magic in its highest form. He made the same sort of breastplate for her as he had for himself. She had barely time to admire it before Hera, awake now, was crying out for one. Her squalling woke the others. She watched, joy in her heart, as he made identical armor for Hera, Hestia, and Poseidon.

Her eyes flickered to Zeus; his expression was less joyous than the others, more metered. She met his eyes for one moment, and as if aware of her observation, his gaze snapped to her own. Her newfound brother’s turbulent expression broke. He strode over to Hades, smiled.

Hades looked at him, and Demeter caught something that passed between them. Something unknown; a measuring up between the two of them, a silent rehashing of the night before.

And then something gave; Hades' eyes softened, and he held out a hand, which Zeus took warmly. The previous’ nights rejection forgiven for the moment – if not forgotten. In the future, she will tell the tale of this night to Persephone, who will look at her with her strange, thoughtful little look.

“But mama,” she will say, “Why did you go with daddy, if he had tried to kill him? Why would Hades ‘pologize?”

And it will be a simple question, from a smart child. Perhaps that generosity, in forgiving Zeus for an apology he had not offered, weakened Hades’ authority from the beginning. Perhaps it was strange that Demeter and her other siblings did not make a larger deal of Hades’ rejection, but the truth was: they had to. The world was frightening. Zeus could navigate it. They had no other allies. Zeus offered a hand. There was very little they would not have forgiven; to be in their position was, at that point, not a position capable of bargaining.

What she did not tell her girl, though she will later wish she would, was this: it was so very complicated. Already she felt torn between her four closest siblings and Zeus. Already then she knew Zeus was smart and clever, and when Zeus turned, grinning, toward her, his eyes alight with some sweet look in that moment after Hades’ had so forgiven him, well, even at that moment, she had felt a blush permeate her cheeks, felt the hint of new beginnings for the six of them, something fragile but joyous.

But how quickly those things fell apart – well, that was not a story Demeter wanted to tell her daughter. So she did not mention it, brushed away the question with prophecy and promises, simple answers. Children’s answers.

Many years later, when Helios’ words as to her daughter are in her ear, she will think: Perhaps she should have been honest.

* * *

That moment, that meeting in the cave, was only a brief moment of peace in a terrible storm. Their father hunted them mercilessly; their father believed in the prophecy that his crown would be lost if he allowed them but one moment, but one breath: it is this that led their father to drown himself in his own prophecy, to force it to come true. They had no choice but to make war to live; were they allowed to flee, they would have settled in new lands, far away. 

Let it not be said, she supposed, that fate did not have a sense of humor. Their father hoisted his own petard with the unfathomable blinders that only those subject to the whims of fate could have placed upon their eyes. Years later, she will wonder: Did he have any inkling of it? Did his people notice it? Was there simply madness in all of them, in the end? She will never know. When she will have time to consider such, her daughter will be a married woman.

The age for that sort of question was long gone. The age for even remembering the war was long gone.

And she tried to forget it.

She was not, entirely, successful. Certainly not in future, but even less here, when she was a young warrior, scared and overwhelmed. The war was horrible. Smoke and fire and ash, everywhere she looked. Demeter became as familiar with death as she became with the sun in the days of the war: not for gods such as herself, but for the mortals. Her father had every mortal creature on earth hunting for them, in addition to the gods. Her father promised great rewards to all, knew from his position of power that he would not need to repay debts once the only credible threat to his power was dealt with.

She and her siblings had bonded through it because what choice did they have? Zeus grew closer to them all, and slowly they formed a pidgin language they all talked in, gave them words that did not exist in their pit: _sky, sun, moon, stars._ By necessity, they honed new tools, too: sword, whip, bident, dagger. Some of Zeus’ caretakers— their mother’s curates, though none of them knew that yet — were powerful warriors, and all of them improved well under their tutelage. She could grow more, now; Demeter kept all her siblings, and the curates aside, well-fed. She could defend herself with both sword and vine. These were new skills and she basked with satisfaction when she saw her siblings and their new-found friends being thankful for her works. She was protecting them; she was doing her job. Often they had to relocate, hiding from cave to cave to cave, but with Demeter’s powers, they always had enough to keep their bellies full, which helped to keep their hearts light.

But the war itself...that was difficult to take pride in.

It became an inexhaustible battle, a morass. When they were found, inevitably, blood turned their rivers disgustingly corrupt, rendered the air foul. Their father’s mortals eventually found them; their cries, even when so quickly silenced by Hades, became exhausting. She still heard them when she slept.

She knew he did, too. He rarely showed signs of it during the day, but at night, he whimpered in his sleep. It woke her, most nights. She would put an arm around him; he would curl himself into the crook of her arm. Again, touch was not a barrier between them yet. Such a position was not comfortable, but it allowed them to sleep. Later, she would wonder: should they have talked about it? Would it have spared them all that was to come to pass later?

But such did not occur without the gift of hindsight.

No one talked about Hades' horrific gift during the war. They all knew what it was. On the battlefield, her shadow-brother cleaved souls from mortal bodies faster than any sword could hope to; it was the only thing that allowed them to keep the odds on their side, to flee before their father’s more powerful allies took the field. It kept them alive. It gave them a chance.

And even Zeus acknowledged Hades' power was useful. They could not ask him not to do it; it was their key means of survival. They all understood that. What they had not yet understood was the costs of making him into such a weapon.

Or having him make their weapons, for that matter.

His ability to shape weapons and armor with his bare hands rendered her little brother one of the most, if not the most, important ally in those early days of the war. Like Demeter's ability to make the ground blossom in verdant greenery, his smithing powers were a novelty on this earth, and no one on the Titan's side was capable of creating armor and weaponry without the heat of the Cyclops’ forges. (His power over death had one rival then; no longer.) The titans still had the cyclopes on their side, then. Hades' skill could not compare to the cyclopes. But Hades could repair their weapons faster, without consuming resources, and he took more than a little pride in granting his siblings the sharpest weapon, the brightest armor. In his own way, he provided just as much as Demeter did.

It was one of the few highlights of a very dark time. Still, she thought too much of the war, itself inescapable. Even when Demeter purposefully tried to ignore her memories, splashes of destruction flashed in her mind the second her eyes closed. She wondered then if, centuries down the line, she would still see splatters of carnage in her dreams. (She would, always.) 

The dreams were something like this: Hades’ hand outstretched from a cliff, launching boulders toward her to knock away from some little river-god, his grasp upon stone somehow as fluid as the river god itself; Hera with her knife, a swirling dervish of golden blood and laughter; Hestia, her eyes heavy, staring at their fire.

These were memories that none of them talked about. Every battle was worse beyond worse, death and destruction beyond compare. They had all become murderers. Once they had taken out the mortal allies, they had to fight the lesser gods that their father set upon them. Rarely did he sent another Titan; their number small enough to be as precious to one another as her siblings were to her. Often they sent other, weaker offspring of theirs: the half-gods, the river gods, nymphs, and dryads that were not as rich in ichor as themselves, their own blood thick with slick or sap or seawater. 

They fought these lesser godlings on the battleground, god to god, golden, sticky ichor spilled until one of them or the other has been hurt enough to withdraw. Their father rarely engaged the battlefield. His presence on the few occasions in which they had seen a glimpse of his golden chariot were always horrible, anxiety-inducing. They all knew it was only a matter of time until he took to the battlefield with them. The idea they might win still seemed so far off a dream as to be unreal. On a rare occasion, they could see him at the tip of Orthys, that gigantic mountain, presiding with his brother, Iapetus.

Between them, they could blot out the sun with their power. Time and death; what didn’t ultimately fall victim to that? 

Demeter and her siblings were always afraid. They each slept lightly and slept rarely. All of them were anxious, always; all of them expressed it in different ways. Hestia threw herself into making more food, more healing herbs mixed in to ease their pains. Demeter gathered extra herbs and spices from her powerful gardens, the spices adding a scent more comfortable than that of the decay of the battlefield. Poseidon responded by increasing his gregariousness, chatting with each bit of nature with an affable air. Zeus would remake himself as an eagle, soar up into the air and scout ahead for them.

And Hades? Her younger brother insisted on drilling every day, again and again until his movements were flawless, soundless. Demeter tried to help him in the evenings. They fought one another every moment until they were both too sore to move, until their movements were automatic. Demeter’s sword-skill improved; Hades himself became the master of the bident, as if to confirm just how far his reach extended. Perhaps that, too, was a warning, though she did not think it such at the time.

They didn’t talk through those drills. Perhaps that too was strange, but Demeter didn’t think they needed to: their sparring proved more than words could say. They were of one mind, one fire.

“How strange you are,” Hera hissed when they would come back, covered in sweat. “How much you stink.”

Hera did not mean it, she told herself at the time. Hera had always had a sharp tongue, but Demeter had noticed how she was now bearing the great weight of her sister’s sharpness more often than the others.

In their father, Hera had cycled through them, and none took much offense to the passing squall of her fury. But now it had become targeted on Demeter.

She knew the reason.

Zeus often tried to talk to her. Zeus was a pretty man, even then; strangely similar (for the ichor in his veins was the same as that which flowed in hers) and foreign all at once (for his tongue moved in strange ways, formed strange words she had no concept of). It was obvious that Hera had formed a crush on him. Demeter could not blame her sister, for she was doing the same.

Even communicating in the pidgin language they shared, Demeter knew Zeus held the same fascination with her. In that, she understood Hera’s jealousy.

"You are so beautiful," Zeus whispered into her ear. "You'll be a queen someday." The lingering touch down her arm said more: _his_ queen, if she’d let him. She did not know then that he whispered the same to Hera. That he would keep such promises— to Hera. He was careful to whisper such to Demeter only when they were alone. She was young enough to find this romantic, and not suspicious.

They were alone more and more often, Demeter noticed.

It was then she went to her closest brother for her his opinion; Hades was not the best strategist but already he had become a good judge of character, one that they would all come to rely on. He noticed truth better than anyone else; whether it was a natural talent or something more, she could not say. She had recognized it from that first moment in the cave, when Hades had taken stock of Zeus. Since, he had not proved them wrong in knowing who they could trust, and which of the few nymphs and satyrs were of their father’s field, spies meant to infiltrate the sibling’s small camp.

“Brother,” she told him, after they had fought one another so long even he could barely breathe. He spread himself out under the stars, his tall, skinny body staring into the dark night. Later, she would wonder if he was already, on some level, seeking the darkness he’d crave. Perhaps he sensed, even then, that it would be one of the relatively few star-filled nights he would ever have. As usual, he laid out on the stone; he seemed, even then, only comfortable in such an extreme place. “I would have your private opinion if you have a mind to give it.”

He looked at her, panting; nodded. She hesitated. He was still breathing so hard she doubted he was listening to a word she said. After a moment he sat up, placed his hand in hers, and smiled. “Tell me, sister.”

She did. Stumblingly, in words she could later not recall, but she did tell him. 

And he weighed such between his hands, weighed them well. He did not look at her, and she knew that for a bad omen. He laid down, staring up at their long-lost grandfather sky. "He is sharp enough,” he offered. She knew it for what it was: both compliment and rebuke.

"He tried to expel you," she said. “I have not forgotten but…” She pressed her lips into a line. She had not forgotten that; the hardness in Hades' eyes suggested he had not forgotten either.

"He fears me," Hades said; his mouth twitched as if it was a joke. Later, she would realize: there was something to fear of Hades. Zeus, for all that she became aware of his true colors later one—he was not a bad judge of character himself. He knew Hades’ true colours long before the rest of them did. "Competition."

She thought for a long moment about her brother’s words. They made her sad. The concept of competition seemed a notable farce, bickering over an ant pile. As if there was any throne they had any chance of holding. The war had already taken so much from them.

"I'll talk to him," she said, thinking the conflict beyond pointless. The only focus they could have was survival; she could not imagine, then, that Zeus would one day hold court in a palace even more elaborate than their father's. She certainly did not imagine the unthinkable thought that she and Hades would not take part, themselves cast off to their own lonely kingdoms: his beneath the ground, hers upon it, and all their siblings far above in their mountain home. “Should be decided together, when things end." Demeter said _things_ because war was too harsh a word, _things_ because it was hard to quite quanity what winning this war would mean.

"Appreciated.” His voice was clipped, unusually cold. “Go with him, Demeter," he said. "He does not treat you poorly, and he is a useful ally enough. Perhaps your love will soften his ambitions." She wondered, later, if he already knew the die that fate had cast for him, if he did not anticipate things far ahead of her, in the prescience of this answer. Perhaps it was something more elemental, a natural calling. Perhaps it was inevitable after his service on the battlefield, where men fell like dominoes upon his feet. But even then: she did not see him just as a murderer, a life-stealer, even knowing full well what those hands could do. She wasn’t blind to it.

She thought him better than that one, inescapable piece of him.

So in gladness, in that time, she grabbed his hand, said her thanks, and swore that nothing would end their friendship. She swore many old promises, then, on her brother’s hand: when father was —somehow —deposed, they would be at peace with one another, and live equally. She promised this with all her heart, with all her soul.

But that, of course, was not how things went.

For a while: she was busy with Zeus. Their flirtations were strong and became stronger; their time alone, _missions_ nearly alone were often. She no longer went with Hades in the evening to pretend to make war – instead, she chased Zeus into shadows, for kisses and, perhaps, more.

She was happy. She would never tell her daughter of this scandalous time: when she was suddenly, outrageously happy. Zeus slowly but gradually became both life and soul to her. Zeus was like her but not entirely like her, and he was fascinating for her because of it: a strange and quixotic obsession that consumed her until it was far too late. He was flashy, a scandalous flirt. He smiled at her with a certain sparkle in his eyes and her body went weak. On the battlefield, Zeus insisted he take up Hades' old position as her protector, watching the women’s back. Hades let him do it, even smiled thinly at them both.

With Zeus working the back-line with her and her sisters, Hades stepped out from her shadow. Without her company, her brother instead turned his attention to becoming a stronger leader. Hades, eldest son, took the forward guard.

It was an imposing sight. He was the tallest of them, slim but no less intimidating for it. The opposite of Zeus’ heavy muscles, Hades was both sinewy and lean. Hades was strong enough and scary enough to part the lesser godlings form their father’s retinue: the nymphs ran to him, the satyrs following. When Hades took control, the world of men retired from the field; they went to their caves, huddled in hopes of avoiding his wrath, Hades who-cut-the-threads. Prometheus, the ally of mankind, came to their side. It was the first major titan defection.

It would not be the last.

Hades received the man warmly but did not keep him in his good graces. Prometheus’ thunderous voice, and Hades’ somehow louder one, became a familiar and sharp noise in their war councils. After a while, Hestia stopped going altogether, disliking the sudden adversarial relationship between cousins. Demeter followed shortly after, disliking her cousin’s penchant for insisting on an argument long after it turned rote. Always it was the same conflicts: Hades’ strategies being more to lure the enemy and strike at their flanks, with Prometheus’ running far more complicated schemes. She could not say which was the better strategy, but her siblings, other than Hestia, divided into camps quickly: Poseidon with Hades, Hera and Zeus with Prometheus.

“Your brother!” Prometheus came roaring into the cave where she and Hestia retired to, long after such arguments had turned tiresome. “He is such a – _malakas!_ ” She did not know the word. Prometheus stared at her, as she stared back, the urge to deny the unknown charge strong on her tongue.

“ _He is savage_ ,” he ground out. She shook her head.

“He is stubborn,” she said. “Not savage.”

“He can be both, child,” Prometheus said. He sounded old, she remembered, even then. “He is nothing like the children of man. No capacity to think like quicksilver in him at all.”

“That is not true,” she insisted; Hestia waved her hand.

“Please,” her elder sister said. “I am tired of all the fighting.”

They stopped, returning to what was more important: keeping their eldest sister in good spirits. By the time Hades joined them, Prometheus had gone into songs, singing in his boisterous voice some ditties that her sisters politely nodded along to despite not understanding many of their words.

“That man,” Hades murmured in her ear as he settled next to her. “He is full of air and dreams. Did he forget which side he chose?” 

“Let it go,” she whispered back; he shook his head.

He did not let an argument go. Ever. Only once, with Zeus, had she seen him tip his hand.

And slowly but surely, everyone turned away from him. It was not just Prometheus; it was any suggestion that ran counter to his own ideas. Hades was not a bad judge of character, but he tended to favor the same few strategies, and gradually, their titan-kin caught on, and countered them.

They started to lose. Everyone saw why.

Even Hades. Hades spent less time in anyone’s company but his own. He sauntered into whatever cavern they called home for the moment late, and no longer slept by her side. Or anyone’s side.

“Our brother,” Poseidon whispered in her ear. “He has become quite a prickly pear.”

Hera giggled; Hestia did not, but nor did she deny it or deflect it. Hades quietly curled himself against the edge of the rock, as if he could compress himself inside of it. Again, she thought, later: a sign of the station he would one day hold.

But Demeter did not see it, not yet. Maybe he did, but her brother no longer shared his secrets with her. All Demeter could do was to run a hand over his shoulder, silent support for a brother whose stubbornness, she was beginning to fear, would extinguish them all.


	3. Chapter 3

It was near the darkest point of the war– an entire chain of losses, all of them his fault – before her brother finally came to her for advice. This showed how far they had drifted from one another; in the earlier days of the war, she would have been his first port of call. Perhaps she still was; perhaps she had not yet realized just how truly stubborn he was.

When he came to her, she knew form his face — his bitten lip, his darting eyes — that the news was not good. He was uncharacteristically nervous. True to his form, he said nothing until Demeter hammered away at him, lulling him into opening his mouth by gently keeping him engaged in a casual chat. Only after he gave her more than one-word answers did she finally probe at his obvious distress. "What has brought upon your obvious sulk, brother? It is clear you are bothered." That is what she said. 

He did not answer for a long moment, stretching his long, strong legs out against the stone of their current cave. "Zeus thinks I should take a bride," he said eventually, his words fast but his movements slow, turned away from her. She leaned over to see him better. The look of him stayed in her memory, would stay in her memory for many years: his face as red and blushing as any young tomato. He had the green cast of a young tomato just turning, too.

She will wonder, many years later, if that same queasy face will be what greeted her daughter as he burst through the earth. Was he nervous, then? Would it be better if he was? She cannot decide, even thousands of years past the event. But that — that was still a long way off, far from the moment.

"Do you think you should do such?" She asked, frowning. Not because she was jealous — though cow-eyed Hera would inevitably accuse her of being so — but because he himself did not seem happy at the prospect. If she had known the future, she would have urged him to go, and go with kindness in his heart to a bride. Anything, anything to spare her daughter her fate.

"He thinks we have a possibility of alliance with one of the Ocean gods. Me and Poseidon - with Oceanus' daughters." Naiads; Demeter pressed her lips together. This was a careful strategy of Zeus’, to wed his brother to brides less powerful than Demeter. She saw that power play, even then. She knew what it was. Surely, even then, Hades did as well. Oceanus’ daughters, their ichor literally watered down – it would not be an equal match. Her and her siblings were, in those days, still finding new powers, effortlessly, all the time — but that was not to say such limited divinity was useless. The naiads controlled the waves, controlled the waters. Furthermore, Oceanus' troops would help to replenish theirs. It was no secret that the waters and their gods were numerous. Only Poseidon held power over the sea in their group of six, and there were so many gods in Oceanus' court that for their father to lose the old man of the sea would be to lose the water ways entirely.

In those days, the world was so much water. None of them could afford to be without it.

Still, she played the skeptic, worried that perhaps Hades would think her too much on Zeus' side should she endorse the plan straight away. 

"And you think Naiads beneath you?" She asked, gently. There would be no shame in such; in war, might made right, and she could not blame him for wishing a bride who shared not only his immortality but his abilities. "She could not hope to hold your power."

"She would not," he said, the tone short and clipped. If only she remembered this, if only but for this, she might have known her daughter's fate, been able to prevent it somehow.

Later she will wonder: why did he never ask for Hera's hand, or Hestia's, immediately after he took command? Why did he wait for her daughter to come of age? But at this time, she placed her hand on his in sympathy.

"Can you live with that?" She asked. Marriage, then, had been considered an important commitment. At least to her. Perhaps to him. Zeus had already begun to divide and conquer the women of their camp, but Demeter was ignorant of such.

He looked at her, let a long stream of breath out in lieu of answering. She thought it was not just the idea of a wife who was less powerful that bothered him. There was something else as well, she thought, glancing at his finely-made breastplate, the armor he'd taken such pride in polishing. Hades had already begun to put on what Zeus mockingly whispered in her ears as Hades’ “airs." (An irony, but not one she understood, then.) Her brother took pride in his appearance, wanted to look the part of a leader even as everything else raged out of control. He polished his armor until it was gleaming. He cut his beard with a razor that he spend hours sharpening, regardless of how long they had trekked or how visibly tired he was. He was infamously fastidious about his appearance, so much so that even Zeus, himself a peacock, took joy in teasing his brother for his care to his toiletries.

(Zeus, of course, she would discover, has more than a bit of a sharp tongue, but at this point in her history, Demeter found such charming. Later, she would see it as a sign she once again forsook without realizing it - a sign of how Zeus would come to think of her as well. But such was long in future.)

"I do not know," Hades said, many minutes later. He leaned his back against the cave wall, let its shadows swallow him whole. That was the most peculiar thing about this man who so obviously wanted to be noticed: Hades also desperately wished, even then, for shadows. He wanted his privacy, she could tell, but there was none to be had, not here, not in the caves they fled to in defeat after defeat. Olympus had many caverns and they were forced to become experts in traversing all of them. "But I do not think I have much choice."

Now it was her turn to be silent; she understood in what he said that he was admitting that he had lost power. That he was running out of ways to say no; that this may be the best of many, many bad options.

"It will not be so bad," she offered. He did not say a word in return for a long time.

Eventually, he leaned his head upwards. "Perhaps not," he allowed. His lip wavered into a sardonic smile. "It is simply...difficult, to think of marrying a woman without so much as knowing her name."

Many years later, this comment would keep her from thinking of her brother as a candidate for her daughter's kidnapper for many, many days. She would wander the world, weak and weary, instead, stopping at each place and asking: where was her daughter? What shadow seized her? By the time she found out, it was pain twice over, for she knew him well enough to know this arrangement was something her brother, once, had protested.

But they had fallen far away from one another, by then.

And one of the reasons why was here, in this moment: she put her hand on Hades' hand. Hades' eyes did not look to her for comfort; they snaked instead towards Zeus, who sat, trim bearded, on the other end of the wide chamber, entertaining Hera and Hestia with some story or another. Hera was giggling at him, her voice low and sweet. None of that group flickered their attention towards Hades, nor Demeter.

But still he watched.

"I will be gone some time. Poseidon too." He flicked his head toward Zeus and raised his brows. "But my sisters..." He gestured. She could see the math in Hades' head, saw it plain as day herself: one man, three women. But at this point in time, Demeter could never have seen the danger of such. What she say, instead, was betrayal, distrust. A sibling needlessly throwing another under suspicion based on nothing but his own jealousies.

"You do not...trust him?" She thought back to their previous conversation. Hades looked at her for a long moment, his mouth only opening to give her a little laugh, an indignant little huff that suggested he was either having a joke at her and Zeus' expense; either way, now, she bristled. Zeus was dear to her as her own life, at the time. She did not have a reason to distrust him — not yet.

Later, she will wonder: did Hades know? And if so, when? Was he trying to tell her, in his own way?

In the end, it did not matter: He did not tell her. He did not even answer, looked away, and she saw all too clearly in that gesture that he didn't like their brother all that much. Her stomach twisted, the thought of her brothers splitting apart too bitter a thought to consider at the time.

"He's a good man," she insisted, all that big-sister scolding flowing up without trying.

He did not look toward her, and such spoke volumes.

"He is," she insisted. Later, she would wonder: which of them was she trying to impress? Was it him, or herself?

"He's useful," Hades admitted at long last. His eyes fluttered to hers, and his hand squeezed her. She thought he meant it as comfort, but she could feel no joy. "Leaving him alone with you...I worry." He did not say why. Years later, she would remember this, and feel a terrible flurry storm through her blood. It was this moment when her terrible anger froze the world. It was the most bitter of thoughts: to know that the predator who has taken so much from her was not immune to the knowledge of what men did to girls when they were left in such desperate situations. He had once feared for a sister. It would be kinder were he like Zeus, who viewed quim as his by right. Easier to excuse if her brother were more a haughty monster. 

But such was far away. Demeter had not yet become a mother, had not yet even become a grown woman, though she thought herself so.

"I'm _your_ big sister," she said, rolling her eyes. "It's my job to worry about you. You know I am no fool. I'll be careful." She returned the squeeze of his hand. "Trust me and go with no sadness in your heart. I will look forward to greeting your bride. You know that she will be welcome."

She would ask Poseidon to help look after him. Perhaps if he could arrange for Hades to marry a woman of some fiery mind, he would be able to be brow-beaten into changing his tactics, mixing things up on the battlefield. She was certain such would help; she herself had gone blue in the face from arguing with him. As had they all.

But she knew, from her relationship with Zeus, that a lover's hand weighed heavier on her shoulder than a sibling's.

Still, such words from her seemed to patch up things between them, for the time: Hades smiled and nodded at her. He then stood, gathered his armor, and bid her goodbye in hopes of preparing to leave quickly. They never had much time. She took advantage of such time in his absence to ask Poseidon to aid their brother in his selection.

Poseidon smiled, delighted to be asked to become part of her plot. Poseidon was, always, the odd man out between his brothers, and being brought into her confidence pleased him greatly. Poseidon kissed her forehead. He was always a good man to talk to: gregarious and sweet. "I'll get him a ball-buster," he boomed.

"Just a prudent one," she said. "One who can talk sense into him." He winked and smiled and said no more of it.

By the time Hades returned, his armor was beyond gleaming. Poseidon winked once more as he took her hand and bid her goodbye; Hades only nodded toward her, himself so obviously distracted by the trip. 

"The extra polish is a bit much," Zeus grumbled, watching them go. "Blinding. Does he think sea women care for such?"

"I think it looks nice," she offered. "Women like to see a man takes pride in himself." And clearly, he did. 

"Man takes too much pride," Zeus muttered darkly. "Might as well be a beacon to the titan-kind." And while Zeus himself was no stranger to vanity, Demeter knew, even then, that he was not wrong. But that was a truth she did not wish to confront, so she instead shoved his shoulder, changed the topic. "You're just afraid I'll leave you for him," she teased; Zeus snorted, shoved her shoulder. Didn't say anything one way or another. Later, she would wonder if this was closer to the truth than not. Later, of course, she would have plenty of time to wonder.

She did not, then.

If Demeter had such time, perhaps she would have noticed Hera glaring at the joke with her most withering stare, but — she didn't, not then. Hera was often sour, so by the time Demeter came to the realization that Zeus had been manipulating them both, it was far too late. Perhaps if she had seen that she would have realized the feckless nature of her brothers sooner. As it was, Poseidon and Hades were gone but minutes when a horrible titan-call came crashing through the cave, and they were battling once again, and fleeing quickly after that.

Zeus could never shake the idea that they had come after sighting Hades' helm from afar, and she could not convince him otherwise.

But it mattered little, for Hades was gone for a very long time indeed before he found them.

* * *

When they returned, Hades and Poseidon, one could cut the tension in their cave with a knife. Demeter, Zeus, and the others had been holding their own in a long siege, among grueling battles. Scores of the lesser-gods had abandoned them, fleeing back into king Chronus' good graces. Zeus and Prometheus had long taken over strategy, and they had all accepted his rule as the right.

Now her brothers had returned. Later, Demeter would never be able to remember how they had found them, only that it had been past the point when most had hope for their still living when they brightened their doorway, two beautiful naiads in tow. Zeus had tensed, and Hera too, but herself? She had run to Poseidon and Hades, hugged both, and, upon seeing the water-spirits shyly hanging behind them, embraced them at once, too.

It was a successful marriage compact and such buoyed her spirits. It was good to have them all together again, and new allies along-side. Poseidon had his Amphitrite, and Hades has his - his....it was terrible, but time has blotted out the Naiad's name. Still, Demeter remembered: she was beautiful, intelligent, clever. She was quick to introduce herself and quick to find her ways to form friendships with other women in the camp: even Demeter was not immune to her charms.

"May I help you?" Her brother's naiad said, as she hung up laundry, infamously her least favorite task. It was a chore made shorter by a second hand, but the beautiful naiad was quick to dance away before Demeter could ask her too many questions, particularly once the topic of her erstwhile brother raised its head. Her brother, too, avoided her; avoided her so much that it took her days to notice that, unlike Poseidon, whose bridal crown was obvious, Hades did not wear one.

She noticed, too, that night: the naiad did not go to his side of the cavern; rather she slept curled between Hestia and Hera, her long and lithe limbs splayed out in a slippery beauty. Untouchable.

When the morning light broke, and they were left well and truly alone: Demeter went to her brother. They were still the earliest risers of their group, and she knew where to find him, where he always was in the mornings: polishing his armor before the dawn in its fastidious array. He looked at her, said nothing, but she saw the grief upon his face, the frustration. "How are you brother?" She asked.

He did not answer. He frowned into the polishing, bent his fingers to the task with speed. "Brother," she said again, this time softly. He said nothing again, his hands simply rubbing the cloth as if that alone was sufficient.

She put her hand upon his cuirass. Her brother stopped, looked up at her. She moved her hand to his chin and he did not turn away. 

"You did not marry her?" Demeter asked; he shook his head.

"Her father has given permission." he said; he did not say more than that, but Demeter read through the lines well enough: a daughter sacrificed by her father as a war bride. She was not ready for such, may not have chosen such. She did not wish to go to his bed willingly. "I have trust if I... give her time, she may perhaps..." He wavered his hands. "Come along." 

"I could talk to her," she said; he chuckled, low and hot in the back of his throat. He did not like the idea.

"And have my shame put forth for all to see? That I cannot _force_ a marriage with a woman, that I must have my _sister_ bring her to my bed with a sweet tongue?" He hissed. She felt fury sweep through her. He knew such was a despicable thing to say, for he quickly turned away, tossing the cuirass into the grass and standing at the shoreline, as if their father was sure to run down and attack them at any second. "The menfolk, if they knew that I could not so much as force a woman—" 

"To a man, your inability to rape a girl might make you weak." Demeter spit at the ground. "But if your brothers’ opinion on your marriage matters the most to you, then you are already hopelessly lost!" She raised her hands to the great grandfather above; he offered no council to her. "We are _at war_. She has seen enough horror. Be kind to her, let your sisters offer discrete tales of your heroism, warm her heart—" 

"I do not need your council, Demeter," he said, colder than cold. And little could she know how well he meant that. Centuries later, he would again decide how little he needed her permission, and how she would weep for it. Perhaps if she had known what was to come, she would have fought back against it.

But on that day, she had little idea of such future-tidings. Instead, she ran inside, to the waiting arms of Zeus, who stroked her back and told her, in not so many words, that whatever sharpness had ushered forth from Hades' tongue would not cut deeply. Zeus soothed her brow with gentleness and grace,.

After a few moments of his soothing, Demeter became aware of another pair of eyes on her back. She expected it to be Hera, or Hestia, but instead when she turned, it was Hades' naiad, her eyes questioning. She was alarmed. Demeter cursed to herself and tried to smile at the girl, hoping her tears did not influence the naiad's thoughts.

The girl did not smile back. She turned quickly away, looking instead toward Hera, who already dictated the cleaning of their temporary home as if she was a goddess of such herself.

Demeter swallowed, feeling guilt that fanned at her belly. She thought to go towards them, but Zeus held her arm.

"Don't." She never knew why he said that; what sort of wisdom her brother held. He offered little. When she turned instead to sharpening her blade, he nodded and walked off on his own campaign. She did not know what he wished. She tried to tune herself to only her own projects; she was not entirely successful in such.

Hades remained notorious by his absence. He did not reenter the cavern until long after her tears had dried. When he came, everyone kept their distance. They all knew the problem in his leadership spanned far beyond his marriage.

Neither Demeter nor her bride ventured close to Hades that night. She watched him from the distance: her brother, still alone, folded up as if he could compress himself into the stone. It remained this way days, then weeks.

The despair that his bride would never surrender to him was becoming obvious. It did not help that Poseidon had found himself a wife of lusty shouting, and that their love-making was all but deafening. Demeter, too, despaired; she had tried to help him find a woman who could aid him, and had instead helped in finding him a mate who would not even bend to meet him.

One night, she took pity on her brother, and crossed the divide to his oh-so-royal bed of stone. He looked at her, and no words passed his lips. She gently pressed her hands to his, squeezed them.

"She will come around," she said, with a faith she did not feel. He said nothing. Looked at her for only a long moment; then his eyes spanned the walls. It was obvious he looked for his bride-to-be, who slept in a small pile of water, choosing to rub herself into the silt rather than lean her head upon his shoulder. She had been meant to be his pride, and this was what he was left to. Demeter could not blame her, but regretted, most wholly, the pain in her brother's eyes.

She said nothing else to comfort him, merely sat a few feet away from him. She had wished to step closer, but such was no longer appropriate, and neither of them were willing to entertain rumors of a closer relationship than they had. She held out a hand toward him, but he did not reach to take it. She could not rescind it, but neither could she move closer to him to insist he take it. Those last few steps seemed all but impossible.

She looked at nothing but the stone. After several hours filled with silence, she nodded off.

She was not sure if Hades ever did.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: some disturbing war imagery, minor character death in this chapter.

In the end, it mattered little. Their group of siblings was torn apart as the titans hemmed them in bit by bit; no longer could they stay in one group. Hades insisted they stay together, and she, too, wished for this, but it was to no end. Too many of her siblings saw strength in splitting their number, and Hades no longer had the power to force others to do his bidding, and so it was done: under cover of darkness, her siblings spilled across the mountains of Greece, to seek new allies and force the titans to spread their numbers thinner. Hades and his bride went toward the northwest; Poseidon and his bride, the southeast seas. Demeter alone was given the wide plains of Nysa; hiding out there among many, many dryads and nymphs loyal to her cause.

At first she missed her siblings, but the dryads were quick to become good friends of hers. Their powers were well-attuned to one another, and the skirmishes they fought were infrequent. Rarely did the titan-born make it so far as Nysa. Hera and Zeus beside her kept them from frequently being hit by the horrors of battle frequently; all knew that to lose Nysa was to lose their only source of food. Demeter focused her time on growing crops and protecting them from notice. She shipped food to her siblings, fought to protect it while it went in transit; the nymphs' weapons, too, clattered all around her, raised in her honor as she led them in battle.

For a long time she kept to it, rallying her dryads and nymphs to her, urging them ever onward to press toward her siblings, to continue their protection, but such left the fields vacant, and Demeter could not deny her power lay in keeping her family well-fed, and gradually, she retired from the battlefield, allowed her most confident and clever nymphs the honor of protecting their borders while she saw to the growth therein.

The following brief peace-time was good to her in many ways: surrounded by life, and minor goddesses who shared the same draw for their power, Demeter's powers grew, and grew. No small part was her role in the community around her: _potna_ _thea_ , the nymphs called her; _lady goddess_. Vines of unknown fruit rippled with her every thought, with their every prayer.

And it was not the only thing growing. Demeter had spent one last night with Zeus before they had parted, and felt now a divine blessing to that union, a little seed that tugged inside of her. She did not tell the others of her upcoming child, yet, but she knew, and that thought, too, brought her happiness.

Demeter had been powerful in the sword, but now she grew confident in her powers, a proper goddess. Soon, she would raise this new daughter to become as powerful a goddess, and with her and Zeus’ power combined, what could the child not do?

"My dear sister, you look radiant," Hestia squealed on a rare meet-up, and she knew it was true. Her skin glowed with a new, divine glory; her fingers shone with each strange burst of power that brought new life to crops in rocky, arid soil. Hestia outfitted all her nymphs with her sacred fire, a gift from herself and Prometheus; such buoyed their spirits greatly.

Hestia was the first to see through her pregnancy as well. “You have been flowering,” she pronounced, and kissed her forehead. “Such brings me such gladness.”

And that buoyed her spirits greatly. So much so that she could not stop herself from smiling for weeks, and by the time she saw another one of her siblings, there was no hope of hiding her pregnancy, not anymore.

"Coming into your own, I see," Poseidon had boomed during a resupply mission, himself no less glorious; Amphitrite and Oceanus' aid had made Poseidon a potent threat all on his own. The titans called him the _earth-shaker_ , such was the fury of his waves. He left her many fish, again to the considerable delight of the nymphs around her.

“For you and the little one. They will need it to be as slippery as we were, eh?” He clasped her in a tight bear hug. “If you need anything, do not hesitate to call upon us. We can keep your child safe in the waters if…” He pressed his lips together, then shook his head. “Well.”

“I do not wish to think of such coming to pass,” she said, truthfully.

“It does not bring me joy to express it, but it gives me peace to know you know the option is available.” He poked one of the smoldering fish in the fire, a frown on his face. “To bring a young one into a war is no easy thing.”

“It was not planned,” she said. “But I do not regret it.”

Poseidon softened at such words, flashing her another quick, dazzling smile. He crossed over to her side of the fire, put his hand around her shoulder, and kissed her cheek.

“Perhaps one of your daughters will marry one of my sons?” She laughed, raised an eyebrow: to think about marriage contracts seemed far too far in the future to bother with.

“I think we will win the war first, and then you will have your sons and we shall see.”

When he left, he left with glad tidings.

Much to her joy, the next to arrive was Zeus: she had feared he would not arrive. But his trip was all too quick, and, in truth, not to her liking.

She had thought they would be quick to make up for lost time, but Zeus had frowned, seeing the new swell to her belly.

“That is…” His face suggested a sort of gravity to it, odd petulance or panic that should have been yet another sign Demeter should have read.

“The child is yours,” Demeter had said, her voice tight. “I haven’t been…”

“I see.” His golden smile returned, and she dismissed the shock as simply that. “I…was taken aback. You should have written.”

“I wanted to tell you in person,” she whispered, and felt the heat that flushed her cheeks. He must have, too, because he took several steps closer.

“Did you now?” He whispered, and when she turned her cheek, he kissed it, sharp and sweet. “Want to see me falter? Gasp like one of brother’s fishes out of water?”

“No, just…” She grabbed his hand, selfishly placed it upon her belly. It would be the first and last time he held their daughter. “Wanted to give you some good news. It’s been so lonely, here, without everyone…”

He grabbed her cheek, placed his head upon her own. “You are always good news,” he said, his thumb gently pressing on her mouth. “Which is more than I can say for most of our siblings.” The casualness of his bitter commentary would have hurt, but she could not quite get past the feel of his finger gently pressing on her lips, soft and sweet and so missed for so long.

And thus, she did not allow herself to think of much else, not for a long time. Zeus was her sun, and he blotted out everything else in his wake.

“Pregnancy agrees with you,” he said, later, when they were panting together in a cave, their armor discarded. “You _glow_.”

“Thank you,” she murmured. “The babe – is there a name you would prefer them to have? I do not know if…”

The odds of the war ending before her child’s birth seemed unlikely. He shook his head.

“Whatever you pick, I am sure it will be a good name.” He seemed unbothered by the child’s fate, his eye looking toward her head instead. He seemed enraptured by her golden halo, the sweep of her powers; "Let us not talk of such things now, not when I have time to put my mouth to better use tasting you.”

“Zeus!” She had said, and felt embarrassed, even as young as she was. She put her hand over her breasts, meant to stand, but he put a hand tight over her breast. Stopped her from rising.

“You taste of the beauty of the earth itself," he whispered to her and chased her with sweltering kisses, and as such warmed her down to her soul.

And thus sustained her for a very, very long time.

* * *

Only Hades and Hera, of her siblings, did not visit her personally for their resupply; Hera trusted such matters to Zeus, or perhaps Zeus had told her that he would do them alone for reasons she would later (but not yet) understand was obvious. As far as Hades, for whatever reason: he let his bride-to-be come instead.

And she was popular among Demeter’s troops. Her nymphs clustered around the beauty, whose wit made her no less adored with them than she had been with the women in the Olympian camp, when it had been hale and whole.

She still wore no rings, and Demeter despaired at that, knowing full well such meant that the woman had all but rejected her brother. She could find no reason for it: Hades was not a bad man.

"Tell me," Demeter asked her, feeding her the last of Poseidon's smoked fish: "How does my brother fare?"

She did not answer for a long moment; still, her gaze flickered to her hand, where she did not wear the bridal gold.

“He lives,” she said, at long last.

“That is good.” Demeter smiled. The naiad did not smile back. She seemed to infer Demeter’s motive on some level, and her discomfort for clear.

“He would be good to you,” Demeter said, softly. “If you would let him.”

The woman stared at her, her dark ocean-eyes cruel and sharp. She said nothing, but her expression made clear how much she doubted it.

“He smells of _death_ ,” she whispered, vehemently. “He is not kind nor good.”

“You misunderstand,” Demeter said, and held out a hand, but the woman would not yield. She stood rapidly, her hair whirling about her.

"I have to go," the woman said, abruptly. No matter how much Demeter begged her to stay, the woman left, her face visibly guilty.

Demeter knew then that the girl had never bent her heart to him. Perhaps she should have written her a letter; perhaps she should have talked more of her brother's virtues during the brief moments when the girl was in her presence. But she did neither, and let the girl slip back in the shadow of night, wheat and barley carried upon her back.

* * *

Though she hated to admit it, Zeus’ plan had been correct: the war shifted in their favor. Without the yolk of Hades' stubbornness over the heads of them all, gradually, the tide began to change. Each made their own plans against their titan aunts and uncles; because they were plans generated from four different minds, predicting them became harder. Because the others protected the breadbasket of Nysa, Demeter was able to keep their troops well-fed, infusing the line with good nutrition and sending more desperate recruits to her brothers’ sides.

It was good for them all, really. Spread out on their own, their powers had grown, and each came into their own, as fighters and as gods.

Except, of course, for two. It was not secret, not to anyone, that Hades’ borders were shrinking, little by little, every single day. And Nysa had neither grown nor shrunk, but Demeter did not feel the need to return to the war-path: with new recruits came new needs to be fed that Demeter was more than content to be the bread-basket that fed them all.

But it was easy to miss their losses when, at the same time, nearly everyone else was scoring a near-miraculous run of victories. Spreading the titan-kin thin has lead to them winning more one-on-one battles. And Oceanus's aid turns a powerful tide as they take the coast, then a few of the islands. New people came to them; they were able to establish an honest-to-goodness headquarters on Olympus, though such was nowhere near what it one day would become. Demeter did not flock to it then and would not go there later; in the far future, Demeter would scoff at her brother's ridiculous taste for gilt and gold. Such did not exist, not quite yet; nor did she yet feel unwelcome the few times she ran her own supplies to Zeus and his followers.

Or at least, she felt welcome by all but Hera’s watchful eyes. Hera refused to talk to her. It was not yet obvious as to why, though it would be soon.

Seeing Olympus, and the sturdy building his brother was building on the high mountain, Demeter knew a painful truth: the time had come for the siblings to remain separated, no matter how much it pained her. They had enough allies now that they had to delegate into their own corps, and it was clearer every day that such would last past the end of the war.

She saw her siblings rarely, surrounded instead by her nymphs, who fawned over her, worshiped her talents. Demeter enjoyed her work as a goddess but could not deny how much she missed her sisters and her brothers most terribly. Even Hera, who once huffed at her more often than not and now only stared at her in staid silence.

Only Zeus came to see her often; Zeus, so often, was the highlight of her days. By this time Demeter was large with child and wasn’t capable of raiding titan-land even if she wanted to. But Zeus had vowed to protect her, and so found his way to her lands more often than not. They laid together frequently, a god and a goddess together, in the passion of love that can only exist between such deities. "Ravishing," he called her; "Nourishing." She was not yet of an age to know that both could not be the truth.

But she was thankful for that idyll of peace, in between the worst of the war and the birth of her daughter.

The world turned, and she turned with it. When it was nearly time for the birth of her daughter, her nymphs crowned her head with a laurel crown; his, too, called them the _future king_ and _queen_. Only one of those titles would come to pass. She did not know, at the time, that he had flung it into the bushes as soon as he left her, lest Hera know. Poor Hera. Would she have gone down the same road if she had known? She would like to think not.

She did not have much time to think of it. Zeus had been gone perhaps a week from her before her womb quickened, and her daughter was born.

Persephone came into the world squalling and fighting, a baby the color of a brisk fall dusk, with skin that was lighter than her mother’s and darker than her fathers. She was a loud baby, and strong; born both fat-thumbed and healthy-lunged. She made noise wonderfully, to the point that Hestia teased that perhaps she was Poseidon’s in a rare visit, though they both knew the truth.

“You should not be alone here,” Hestia said, frowning, as she beheld Persephone. Persephone gurgled into her auntie’s breastplate, as if agreeing in them.

“Nysa is well protected.” She shot back, at the time young enough to be sensitive to any criticism of her motherhood. “I have you and Prometheus to the west, and Hades to the east. Hera and Zeus to the north, and Poseidon and Amphitrite to the south.” 

“Yes, but should any of us fall, you will be in danger .” She pressed her lips into a thin line. “I want only for the girl to grow without being exposed to what we lived.”

“I know, sister.” She had thought similarly herself. She had thought that perhaps Hades would join her, but Hades, though he shared her eastern borders with her, did not visit. She imagined it must be mostly through his hunt for his titan uncle, the target he had been assigned. Iapetus rarely left his sons, and while Demeter tied her vines around Atlas' shoulders, it was Hades who kept Atlas' father busy, forcing him and his wife Clymene to come up from the underworld or, more often, digging trenches down to try to find the entrance to them. Only Hades could even attempt to fight Iapetus, for only Hades was immune to Iapetus' ability to summon both living and dead mortals to hurl at them. Hades ability to cut the strings of mortality was their only salvation against such overwhelming numbers.

Occasionally, she heard rumors of him: that he was brutal on the battlefield, that he fought like a tiger for every scrap, that he was obsessed with defeating Iapetus, and in doing so coming that much closer to ending the war. Less stellar rumors too: that he was a madman, demanding trenches unceasingly, working his own lesser gods into death; that he was cavalier with lives, leading high-cost attacks that led only to negligible border gains or, worse, losses; that he was unrelenting but equally inflexible. She did not doubt much of the gossip proved true, but finding confirmation was damnably hard. His naiad did not often share news of him.

“Have you heard much of him?” She had asked Hestia, who had pursed her lips, paused bouncing her baby niece on her knee.

“You would hear before I, I think. I know little, only that Zeus and Hades have fought often. Zeus sends me letters.” Her eyes were sad there. “Urging me to try to convince Hades to change his tactics.” It was not a secret as to why; Hestia was the usual peacemaker, if ever there was one.

“His bride comes for supplies, but refuses to talk of him.” She took a long sip of her barley drink; Hestia did the same, despite Persephone’s squirming attempts to reach for the cup. They shared a knowing look.

“I think at this point, perhaps, we should stop calling her his bride,” Hestia murmured delicately, and she winced.

“Yes,” she murmured. “Perhaps so.”

It was odd, and ill-boding, she thought, to have updates on her own brother come only from gossip. She missed him. Even his naiad rarely stayed, and when she came for supplies, she did her best to avoid Demeter. She wrote him a letter once, chased down the slippery naiad to bring it to him; he did not reply. She could not entirely hold it against him. They were at war, and Hades had always been on the front-lines, his talents too useful to hide. She doubted he even cared about the world that she had made with the nymphs, the new produce they had created to feed their now quite large army. 

It was easy, then, with baby Persephone at her knee, for Demeter to busy herself into thinking that his lack of reply was merely because he was _busy_. Somehow, magically, busier than any of her other siblings, who had all found time to visit. She tried not to probe too deeply into her brother's psyche, figuring that he was only involved in more engagements than their siblings. It was no secret Iepatus was her father’s right-hand man, after all. They were at war, and they did not have time to probe too deeply. She would ask, she thought, at the end of the war.

But it did not take that long to realize that something was drastically, drastically wrong with her brother.

* * *

The day she realized that truth came suddenly, tragic, and without warning. One of her nymphs saw the fire burning, grabbed her, shouted: _aiuuttto!_ _We are needed!_ The smoke was a desperate maneuver; whoever had sent it, she knew, had to be in distress. But the smoke signal was there, and so she was pulling on her sandals in great haste, her cuirass all but thrown on. Persephone howled, unhappy at being taken from her mother’s breast; her heart twisted, but she did not hesitate in slipping on her shining helmet, taking her infant to a pair of most loyal naiads. “Please, if I do not return within the next day, or should the titans advance here…” She licked her lips. “Take the girl to my brother, Poseidon. He will keep her until…” She could not quite come to the end of the sentence, but the naiads spared her it. The eldest—Efthymia—simply placed her hand upon Demeter’s cuirass.

“ _Potnia_ ,” she said, with her gravel deep voice. “Your command will be done.”

Perhaps it was telling that she had given her daughter over to Poseidon instead of to her father; maybe on some subconscious level, she could sense Zeus was perfidious to her in some way. She thought, at the moment, she feared Hera on some level, that she might harm Persephone, and later Demeter would be very certain indeed that while Hera might have received her daughter, she certainly would not have made her feel most welcome. But such mattered literally in the moment; she did not have time for anything but a brief goodbye, a gentle kiss upon her infant daughter’s brow.

Persephone, of course, shut her beautiful brown eyes, opened her caramel-mouth, and _screamed_. She had always been a loud child, and her cries echoed as the naiads took the girl deeper into the cave, for safety.

The dryads helped prepare both themselves and her for battle, with speed on the very essence. They all tried to ignore Persephone’s cries. They had had few battles, these dryads but they knew, together, that this was deadly serious. A smoke signal, after all, alerted more than one camp of distress.

And that could surely only count as in triplicate for Hades. Hades and his pride. He’d not make a signal fire if he didn’t desperately need it.

But the signal was lit from the east, and there was no other camp it could have come from.

Demeter did not allow herself to think about the fact that the smoke was coming from Hades' lands. She only threw herself into the run towards the smoke, the nymphs and minor goddesses of flora and fauna running quickly on her heels. Her scythe felt hot between her hands. Hades had set the signal for aid. It was hard to imagine hard-hearted Hades ever deigning to do something so desperate as a distress signal, but there is no mistaking it: the curled puffs of smoke: _help. help. help_. Over and over again. The alternative: that his camp was gone, rendered only smoke and ash—she did not allow herself to dwell on it. Thinking about it would not aid her in any way.

She only forced herself to run faster. It would be up to her; her position in the heartland meant that she would be a fast reinforcement, especially in the east, where Hades’ lands sloped mostly downhill.

And so, she ran. She ran and ran and ran. Demeter had never run so fast and so hard in all her life, not since she had first received her freedom. Her lungs hurt and her calves hurt and even her hands hurt from gripping her weapon, but Demeter kept on running, fast as she could. She ran and allowed herself to think of nothing, nothing but how she had to make it in time.

How she longed for him to be alright.

Did she think of the naiad, then? She hoped, later, that she did, but she was never quite sure. The run and everything about it faded in her memory, until only the desperate terror of it remained, years later, and the horrible ending to it all.

The smoke burned more as they got closer to the signal fire, and the ash burned hot, embers of it flickering against her skin. Her eyes stung from it, and her dryads coughed, their sticky lungs more sensitive to the smoke that threatened to wick their bodies alight. They pressed on regardless, then Demeter stumbled over a pile of something; she went flailing, her arms landing into a pile of hard armor and brittle bone. Her stomach turned; bodies. A stack of bodies. She could barely see them through the smoke, but recognized from the armor that none were her brother.

And her panic rose, then, and it burned deep in her throat as she noticed there was more than one ossuary of bones and armor. Iapetus, no doubt, had taken the field. Whether the fire came from him or her brother, she could not say. She could see neither of them. By the time she realized that there were several cairns of bodies, set high, panic rose to her throat; the casualties were all on their side, the armor lacking the distinctive hammer work of the cyclopes.

"Brother!" She cried out; foolish, in such low lighting. She could not know if there were still enemies around. Still, she forgot every rule she had learned on the battlefield and called out regardless: _brother!_

He did not respond.

She stumbled further and further, arms outstretched, and she could only hope to find him by feel. But everything she felt was death: everything she stumbled into was another corpse, another smoking pile of what had once been allies. She did not see his distinctive gleaming armor in there, and it was only that that kept her moving on.

This had not been a loss of a few centimeters of territory. This had been a complete _rout._ She could not even begin to guess how Hades had lost so badly; the massacre so total.

It took her a great deal of time; by the time she found her brother, staring numbly at the source of the fire, a massive, massive bonfire that made even a man so tall and sinewy as he seemed absolutely puny. He seemed oblivious to her call, and she would have been annoyed by it, had she not been so relieved that he was alive.

"Hades," she said, her voice cracked. Hades did not respond.

"My lady," one of the dryads said, coughing into her hand. "He is surely the only...survivor." She nodded; this was no doubt true. He was the only person standing. There was no enemy left among them, and she could only pray to the fates a silent thanks for sparing her brother.

But then she immediately wondered if they _had_ spared him, for at this, too, he merely stared, unblinking. “Hades?” She whispered and waved her hand in his face.

He had no reaction. His face remained as impassive as stone.

At this, her panic boiled in her bell. This was not normal. This is not her brother. Hades had never been loquacious, but he had been at least responsive.

"Is that true, Hades?" She asked genty, trying to get something out of him. He was still all but catatonic. There was no recognition in his eyes. There was no response in his large fame. She placed both her hands on his gaunt cheeks, hoping the physical touch would bring him back to reality. But Hades did not blink. Hades remained a mute, powerless statue, and she quailed, for her brother had been many things, but one of his attributes had always been to be brave warrior not..whatever this was.

"Hades," she said. "Hades." No answer. She ran her hand on her mouth; he still drew breath.

"My lady, did he do…?" One of the nymphs chirruped, pointing out what Demeter herself could not see. Her stomach twisted as Hades turned, following the Nymph’s outstretched hand. Then, she saw it, at the center of the fire: the naiad girl.

She was dead. Her blood was boiling in bursts, the hot smoke curling out of her body, but she looked otherwise untouched; it was as if Hades had snapped her strings, as easily as he once had done so to mortals who dared to come after them.

Demeter's eyes widened.

The dryads with her saw their sister in the fair, and begin to wail in mourning-song.

Zeus would have told her this is the point that she should have begun to fear him. Perhaps Hera or Hestia would have feared him, then.

But Demeter, so recently made a mother, recognized distress, and so she grabbed his hand, pulled him to her side. “Bury her ashes," she snapped to the dryads. "With the honors she would...she would get, in her father's house." Somewhere in Oceanus' many thousands of rivers, she knew now that one had gone dry. She wondered if they would see it, her parents; she could not imagine the grief she would feel, should Persephone vanish from her. A cruel thing, but one day she would know that pain, and know the horribleness of it. And know, too, that it would come from the same man’s hands.

But then, in this moment, her attention remained wrapped up by her brother. Hades made another strange, inhuman croak; a sort of mourning-song that no bird could ever sing, the untouched agony of a broken creature. "I'll see to him."

"My lady--" One of the nymphs offered, then hesitated, for Demeter made little secret of her priorities. The man was alive and needed aid. “Should we not put this fire…out?”

"I shall be busy with him," she said; she would drag Hades all the way back to her camp. “Do what you think is best,” she added, softening. It was not as if there were procedures for what should be done when gods died. Such was a very, very rare thing in their world.

She put her arm around Hades’ shoulder. “Walk with me, brother,” she said. And though the path back home was long, she had little intention of stopping until she got there; she would not attempt to break through to him in the mire and muck of the horror that she had witnessed in the attempt to find him. Miraculously, Hades did walk with her, his footsteps echoing her own.

But he never said a single word along the way. She looked at him as they climbed up the path to Nysa and wished she hadn’t: his face was still frozen, slack with shock.

She did not say anything. What could she say? She wasn’t 't sure how to deal with his obviously shattered soul, so she instead kept walking, one foot in front of the other. She did not glance back, and neither did he.

It took hours to arrive back at the golden fields of Nysa. The nymphs fawned over her, relieved to see her and anxious to not see their companions, but she was quick to set the matter straight and Efthymia was willing, thankfully, to look after her daughter for a few moments more. Her stomach twisted further at the thought: she had looked forward to introducing her closest brother to her child, but such was not the moment.

“See you soon, sweetness,” she had promised, and had kissed her daughter’s tiny little toes, sending her off in bright, incongruous laughter. Hades had little reaction; she doubted he could even remember the lands she had brought him to. He still stank of blood and ash and she was quick to usher Persephone away.

That one, she forced herself to cluck with him over the things that were easy to fix: the blood on his armor, the matting of his hair. She drew him a bath, helped him to disrobe, and forced him in. What was a nakedness to them, when they had been alone together for so long? She did not see him in such a manner and he seemed not to even notice her aiding him in pushing him toward the water. She tried not to notice how the water turned golden-red with blood - not his.

"I didn't love her," he murmured, the only words he said since she had dragged him from the battlefield. Demeter sat back, stunned. In years later, she would play that moment in her mind, over and over, and wonder if he meant it as a warning. There was not a way he could know, surely, not at that point.

"Oh," she said. She did not know what else to say. She rubbed at his shoulders, a useless comfort. Her brother did not blink.

"I should have," he said. His voice was flat, affect-less. "But I didn't."

She could not think of anything to say. There was nothing to say. It was not a secret; the woman had not seemed to hold much love for him. What love could he have for a woman who been so strong as to refuse to compromise, to find a way to his bed, to listen to even a word of his praise?

She only hoped her death had not been at his hands. She wanted to ask what had happened, but could tell, too, that such was pointless, with him looking so slack and so…lost.

“I didn’t love her,” he said again. “I should have. But I didn’t.”

“Shh,” she offered. “It does not matter now.”

“I didn’t…didn’t love her,” he said again. He repeated the phrase over and over, and though she tried to make smoothing sound, tried begging him to be silent – nothing seemed to work. He kept whispering it over and over. He was in shock, she thought; she did not know what to do. Who could she ask for guidance? Death was not something well known to the divine,not to the gods and not even to the nymphs. She wondered, then, about her nymph warriors, still no doubt buying burying the girl. She felt guilty for leaving them; there was no She wondered if he would prefer to be there, to feel he was doing something, despite his lack of love, but he did not comment on such.

In fact, all he did was shiver and murmur the same sentences, over and over and over.

"It's alright," she said, patting his head. She dumped some of the warm hot spring’s water over his thick hair, trying to clean it and hoping he wouldn’t talk while she was doing it. Perhaps she should have let him, she would think later. Years later, she would wonder, was his mumbling was a warning, then? She would not even contemplate it as such for many, many years, not until he had stolen away her daughter and left her bereft. At the time, she scrubbed his head, beat at his back and tried to bring him back to himself; after some amount of time - she did not know how long, the world was slower then - he finally quieted. He did not leave the water. She did not ask him to. She stayed at his back, whispering words of comfort. 

"You were not her husband," she pointed out. "You were not bound to her." A beat past between them; he said nothing. "Was there...someone else?" She wondered. Hades was one of her brothers she had seen least.

"No." He sighed. She does not like to contemplate what had happened, what her brother may have done; had it been Iapetus? Had it been him, some sort of tragic accident or worse, some sort of purposeful tragedy, a madness he was driven to? She wished she knew what to say but death was something she had no experience with. She had not known nymphs could die. They were not quite mortal, and she had always assumed they were like her siblings: unending.

“If you did not take her life, your lack of love for her…” She pressed her lips together. “It is not entirely your fault. Sometimes such things happen.”

" _I did not take..."_ He raised one hand, dropped it. “It happened so fast. I didn’t. I couldn’t stop it. All I could think was…” He shook his head. "I tried to love her," he offered. "But I couldn't. And she couldn’t…” He swallowed. “I _tried_ —”

"Sssh," she said, wishing he hadn’t gone back into that same repetition. He made a horrible noise, a grinding vocalization of mourning that hurt to listen to. She smoothed his hair – his as wavy as hers was curly. His look remained stormy. She stared at his face, rocky and lost, and knew what she had to ask.

"What happened...?"

"Iapetus," he murmured. "Touched her." He snapped his fingers. "Came up right behind her. Wordless. I reached but she was…Just gone. I couldn't..." His heavy chest heaved as another of those horrifying noises ripped through him. "I didn't love her. But I would have..." He looked up at her, those brown eyes full of horror. “She blamed me. I saw. Her last look…she blamed me.” 

"

“It was not your fault.” She leaned down and grabbed his hands. “It was not your fault.”

“It was,” he said, with a wince. “She would not have been alone had I…had been able to love her.”

“That Iapetus can attack in such a way…” She swallowed. It did not bode well. Clearly, it must have been a sneak attack, and equally clearly, Iapetus held the same power as Hades himself did, but his not only took mortal lives but immortal ones, and it was not clear why he had bothered to spare Hades.

Perhaps, she thought sourly, only for the man to know the pain he was currently going through.

I didn't know he could do that," she said. Iapetus was the god of the dead; foolishly, she never thought he had the power to _give_ death, even if she had seen the very same behavior in her brother's fingertips. "Did you...?"

"Yes." He closed his eyes. Demeter frowned, but the conversation ended abruptly, as he kicked away from her, diving underneath the water to rinse his hair. He could swim now, she noted. Of course, he could. Either his naiad had taught him such or Poseidon had met up with him. She herself has not quite learned how to do so: Poseidon had offered, but with Persephone, she was afraid to be gone from her daughter for long. She had refused it, figuring she would learn when Persephone did. 

"Why don't you stay here?" She said, gently, as Hades surfaced, splashing her with water. Hades turned toward her, his expression sharp but his mouth silent. "A few days at least." There was no one left in his corps; he could not retake his territory alone. “There is someone I want you to—”

He breathed heavy and held up a hand, she said nothing, and for a long moment, neither did he. The current in the room passed between them, inhaling, exhaling, and silent, silent, silent. "I shouldn't.” He said, finally. “He'll take it as a sign of his victory, Deme. Zeus, too.”

"Let him." She grabbed his shoulder, squeezed it tightly. "You are my brother. We will shore up the line here." Zeus, perhaps, would mind, but Zeus and Hera were far away, and would come later.

"I must avenge her," he said, his voice thick.

"Then you will have better luck doing it with me." He looked at her and gave her a short, clipped nod. He pulled himself from the water, sat next to her. Later, many years later, she will think of this moment: her offer of blood-thickening, her offer to take place in ritual murder for her brother’s sake. And she will wonder, then, if Hades knew what he was agreeing to as he slowly nodded his head toward her.

"We don't know how it works," he said, softly. "Among our kind, if they cannot be raised—” There was hope in his eyes, but Demeter didn’t dim it, even thinking that such was unlikely. Even then, at this nascent stage, Demeter knew: The Dead were Dead. They were in another plane, and Iapetus, for all his strangeness, was their lord. Hades would not be able to get her back, no matter how much he craved to do so. What could he do? Sing Iapetus a song and ask for her to return? The woman may not even wish it.

But there was little hope, she thought, and no need to say such. He would come to his own conclusions soon enough.

"We can find out," Demeter said instead. Then: "Come." She gathered him in her arms, helped him dress, and took him to what passed as her living quarters. He insisted he sit by her so that when the nymphs returned, their eyes wet with morning, he had her there to hold his hand.

This was what siblings were for, she thought. Comfort.

"Brother," she said, as the nymphs departed, their tender business done.

"Sister," he said, and slung his arm around her shoulders. He did not ask the nymphs where the girl was buried; in hindsight, she should have seen that as a sign, perhaps, as to whether his feelings were made more in mourning for the woman lost or anger for the man who had taken her.

“There is someone I want you to meet,” she offered, her smile shy. She took her daughter back from Efthymia, placed her in his arms.

He curled his arms around the girl, and this moment, too, played long in Demeter’s memory’s years later: the pure peels of laughter from Persephone at his hands, wide splayed over her back, the way her heels kicked out at him.

“She is a strong child,” he said, quietly. “Zeus’s—?”

“Yes,” she said, with more pride than she would think of such later. He curled the girl in his arms, protected her as he curled inward on himself, as if he were expecting an attack. Perhaps he was.

“A strong child,” he repeated. "Healthy girl." She reached up with grabby little hands for his beard, and though he did not smile, she was thankful enough he seemed to tolerate it for a long moment before handing her back. 

Persephone grinned, widely, her little gummy smile happy as she was reunited with her mother. “I missed you, my sweet,” Demeter whispered and turned her attention to the care of her baby daughter. As far as Hades, he stayed with them, but he did not curl up in her halls to sleep. He only curled himself further into the stone of the cave, as if he could make himself become the stone itself. Again, she should have taken it as a warning.

But she did not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies it's taken a long time to update, I've been underwater for a while but am trying to punch up and out of it and am hoping to have this finished by January (Sorry toast!)


End file.
